Manga'esque comic strip/ graphic novel devoted to the adventures of three teenagers, Cary, Gina and Rabby whose dystopic and dysfunctional existence is alleviated via their online exploits in the cyber world of Cloud 109.

Friday, 20 September 2013

A week ago I posted that advance copies of the eagerly awaited 'Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan' had arrived at Book Palace Books HQ. Having shared the photos of the book's covers that we received from our printer, we have been looking forward to sharing with you some of the contents of this publication and that moment has now arrived.

Both editions of this book are a delight to hold, the smell and feel of the matte archival paper makes leafing through the book a real pleasure. The sewn binding again just exudes quality and means that the book will open and reveal all of the pages right into the gutter. This is something which other books attempting to reprint spreads from UK comics have often made problematic, with crucial dialogue and artwork often becoming irretrievably lost in the process. In the case of 'Heros', our printers Prolong Press, went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the signatures of pages butted up cleanly and precisely with each other so that all of this extraordinary strip was visible to the reader.

As regards the print quality, I am pleased to say that the weeks of painstaking restoration work has been really well realized by virtue of superb repro from our restorations and the matte archival paper ensures that not one line of Bellamy's pen work has been obscured in the process as these close-up photos reveal.

The penultimate photo shows one of the 11 original boards that
appears in the sumptuously bound red leather edition with gold blocking,
of which there are only 120 copies.

I won't witter on any more about these books, other than to say, that we feel that this book is the best book we have produced so far and response to it has been tremendously positive with over half the entire print run sold before publication day. On the subject of which, we had another notification from our printer to say that we could expect to take receipt of these books on 15th October, they are still at sea but getting ever closer to these shores.

Here again are the links if you would like to order copies of the book:

Monday, 2 September 2013

We have sensibly sat on our hands over the last few weeks before
making any further announcements about the eagerly awaited Book Palace
Books edition of 'Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan'. But I am pleased
to be able to say that the problems our printer was experiencing with
certain aspects of the production of the leather edition of this
monster book have now been resolved to everybody's satisfaction and
barring typhoons, tsunamis, krakens or Somali pirates the container
vessel with several palettes of 'Heros' will be arriving on these
shores early next month and is slated to arrive at Book Palace HQ on
October 10th.

But
while we are on the subject of 'Heros', I thought I would share with
you some of the restorative work that went into preparing the scans we
made of the original comics ready for publication.

Although the firm of Eric Bemrose who printed the Eagle
and all of Bellamy's work on 'Heros' were rightly regarded as being the
best in the business when it came to printing photo gravure comics and
periodicals, they did slip up from time to time and aside from the ever
present problem of out of register colour pages, some of their work
towards the latter part of 'Heros' run did suffer a bit as can be seen
in these examples, where in the spread that occurs near the start of
'The Axe of Arguth', you can see that the colours have over saturated
(particularly the yellow) to the point where a lot of Bellamy's line
work is getting obscured by the resultant murk. If you look at the close
up head you can see this occurring.

What
we had to do was to haul back a bit on the colour and where detail had
been lost, carefully select the black line and create a separate layer
for the line so that the art could be successfully restored and
Bellamy's work seen as he intended it.

Similarly
later in the same story there is a sequence where over printing of
black has created a rich and dense black as the artist would have
intended, but where there is no over printing the black appears greyed
out. Again we had to carefully select the affected areas and reintroduce
the missing elements to make the black as rich as intended, thereby
removing the distracting patchiness which is particularly evident on the
detail of Heros in extremis.

I
won't bore you by showing you all the stages of the restoration
involved in each of the spreads but this epic comic strip is, we
believe, worthy of this attention to detail.